656
PARTISAN REVIEW
times rather!"
Kadare laconically describes Mark-Alem's horrifying VlSlt to the
Archives, whose huge rooms are devoted to dreams of "profound captiv–
ity," others to anxieties, hallucinations, as well as to dreams of each
sovereign and to dreams of the insane. We are impelled to share the be–
wilderment and anxiety, fatalism and weariness that Mark-Alem feels in
this underworld where dreams take on an oppressive afterlife of their
own, where those who misinterpret or overlook the "crucial" dream and
its symbolism are "disappeared." The story of Mark-Alem's meteoric rise
through the Palace's bureaucracy (we can only guess at the price this will
extract) is artfully intertwined with the four-hundred-year history of
Mark-Alem's family, "fated equally to glory and to misfortune." "We
Quprilies," Mark-Alem's favorite uncle jests, "we're like people living at
the foot of Vesuvius. Just as they are covered with ashes when the volcano
erupts, so are we every so often struck down by the Sovereign in whose
shadow we live."
The Palace of Dreams
was, like most of the books discussed here,
banned in its native country. "Dictatorship and authentic literature are in–
compatible," Kadare has remarked. Yet one continually marvels at the lit–
erature which has sprung up under the heels of tyrants. In his recent essay
on totalitarianism, the British writer John Berger got it right: "Most
literature has been made by the disinherited or the exiled. Both states fix
attention upon experience and thus on the need to redeem it from obliv–
ion, to hold it tight in the dark."
